I wouldn’t have normally had the nerve to ask a strange, beautiful woman if I could sit with her, but today, enjoying the early spring sunshine of Golden Gate Park, watching the flitting of butterflies and hearing the buzzing of bees, I felt particularly daring. I mumbled my request and remained standing, just on the off chance that she would refuse.
She looked up at me with eyes that for a moment seemed clear as water, then darkened to a good, solid blue. “You see me!” Her voice was like orchids, throaty and fragile, as if she didn’t talk much.
“Yeah, sure I do.” I answered immediately before I could think what an odd question it was. I sat down beside her as close as I dared and put my newspaper and my lunch salad and my bottle of fancy spring water between us.
Up close, she was less fragile, more visible, and the fairy light that danced around her head settled down and proved to be the noon sun reflecting off the bay. She smelled like gardenias with a touch of carnation, almost a taste rather than a scent. Almost funereal, but… pleasant.
Flower power. This woman had it, from her long red hair to her deliberately scuffed bell-bottom jeans to the tips of her sandaled feet.
“Don’t people normally see you?”
“Not normally,” she confessed. “They just sort of… look past.”
I thought of how her shoulders had seemed to disappear into the back of the bench. But she was plainly solid up close. Thin as a model and pale, but substantial. She was wearing a jacket a bit too big for her that must have once been a deep, ruby red but was now faded to a streaked pink. It had gold embroidery around the cuffs and running up the front, a kind of flowery fleur de lis design that had frayed and cracked with age. It looked weirdly familiar, as if it were something I’d seen before.
I picked up my salad and fought with the supposed easy-open corner. “I don’t see how anyone could look past you. Not with that hair.”
She fingered a long copper curl as if she’d forgotten she was wearing a halo of fire around her head.
“It’s beautiful,” I offered, “especially with the sun shining on it.”
She looked at me as if she was as startled at being paid a compliment as I was at giving one. She blushed, a pale pink that touched only her high cheekbones and just above her eyebrows. “Thank you. No one’s said something like that to me in a long time.”
I was smitten. In addition to a funky retro jacket and hair like new pennies, she had the smile of a siren, bright as sunflowers.
“I’m Charles.” I held out my hand.
She touched her small hand to mine. Her skin felt strange, cool and there, yet… so not there. Like the brush of dandelion fluff. “ Arizona.”
I could help but laugh. “ Arizona? That’s your name?”
The smile faltered. Her hand slipped away, leaving a ghostly impression of coolness where her fingertips brushed.
I rushed to patch my faux pas. “With hair like that, I thought you’d be Caitlin or Maureen or… “ I searched my mind for another obviously Irish name and couldn’t think of a single one.
She relaxed, her smile returning. “It’s from a song.”
And immediately, the lyrics popped into my head. “ Arizona, rainbow shades and hobo shoes. Paul Revere and the Raiders.”
She smiled even wider, surprised and delighted that I got the reference. “My mom and dad were sort of hippies.”
“I wanted to be a hippie. More than I ever wanted anything in my life. I even bought a map of San Francisco and a moth-eaten old duffel bag and kept it packed and hidden in the back of my closet.” I couldn’t believe I’d just told her that. I’d never told anyone about the stuff I’d dreamed when I was a teenager. It all just seemed so silly and flighty. The exact opposite of the rock-solid person my parents expected me to become. And I guess there was a bit of disappointment in there, too, that I’d never shinnied down the pear tree that grew right outside my window and lit out for California.
I’d missed the summer of love and Woodstock and Monterey Pops. The closest we’d come to anything hippie in East Texas was Jimmy Johnston, who wore his kinky blonde hair in a ’fro and went around saying “Groovy, dude,” to everyone, until he slipped and said it to our English teacher in class one day and got sent to the Principal’s office. The Haight-Ashbury district that had seemed so exotic and exciting was now just The Haight, home to Gap and Starbucks. I hadn’t moved to San Francisco until I was forty-something, and only then because I was promoted into it.
Arizona and her shining hair and the strangely familiar, flowery, faded embroidery on her sleeves brought back the bittersweet smells and sounds of those summer nights. Lying in my bed, listening to Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker and Jefferson Airplane, with the radio turned low so my parents wouldn’t hear. Smelling the warm, growing earth and the green pears. Dreaming of hopping a freighter headed west.
“What was in your duffel bag?”
I still remembered that, too. “A pair of bell-bottomed jeans that I bought off a guy named Jimmy Johnston. And a poster for a Janis Joplin concert. And clean socks.”
She laughed, a rougher sound than I’d have expected from such a delicate woman.
I looked down at my sensible leather dress shoes and smiled. I would have been the only flower child in Haight-Ashbury wearing clean, white cotton socks. I guess solid and rebellious are strange bedfellows.
“Why did you want to be a hippie?”
I opened my mouth to be glib but, again, wound up telling the truth. “I didn’t want to be sensible and steady. I thought being a hippie sounded like a magical way to live. Free and alive, the way Janis Joplin was. Unfettered, spontaneous. Music, drugs, free love.”
She frowned, as if I’d said something goofy again.
“I know it probably wasn’t like that. I mean, living moment to moment may sound glamorous, but not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t all that… groovy.”
We both grinned at my use of the word.
“I guess the fact that I thought I’d need clean socks tells you I wasn’t cut out for it.”
“I think you can be glamorous and free and still have clean socks,” she said, and for a moment, I saw that sparkling light again and caught a glimpse of a Monterey Pine, needles shifting gently in the breeze through her forehead, as if her brain was clear.
I rubbed my eyes. Seeing things like that sounded like all the stories I’d read about LSD trips. When I looked up, her forehead was just a forehead again, solid and wrinkled by fine concentration lines.
“Why didn’t you do it?” she asked. “Why didn’t you run away and become a hippie?”
“I don’t-I’m not sure exactly.” I didn’t like the sound of the words coming out. “I guess… I guess the right time just never came. And then it was too late.”
“I was there once,” she said. “For a while. It was cool, just like the books say.”
“There where?” A bean sprout fell off my fork onto my thigh. I brushed it away. Why did I feel like our conversation lulled her into saying something she didn’t mean to? Why did I, for just second, think she meant she’d been to Haight-Ashbury, in the Summer of Love?
Then she looked at me, straight into me. As though she could see through me. “ San Francisco, back then. I was there for a while.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t know about taking you there, but… I think I can take you somewhere you’ve never been before. If you want to go with me on my next trip.”
Because I was still in that whole Woodstock, summer of love frame of mind, I immediately thought she meant a trip. A drug trip. But… would I do it? I sat there, staring at her. Kind of stupidly, I imagine. Like a big, dumb rock with a heart beating triple time. Would I do it? Wasn’t that the kind of recklessness I’d always wanted? Hadn’t I always intended to try tripping, just once? But I wasn’t that fourteen-year-old dreamer anymore.